Web opportunities for earning extra cash

Sunday

Sep 9, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

After we wrote about smartphone apps for small jobs, a reader living on a retirement income asked about apps that don’t require a smartphone. He was especially interested in “mystery shopper” jobs at retirement communities, because they pay well and only ask that you pretend to be a customer.

The websites MysteryShop.org and Bestmark.com have links to hundreds of these kinds of jobs, but as always you have to beware of scams. Never accept a job that requires a deposit. MysteryShop claims their members are all legit, but we found one link on their site that looked questionable. Scams abound. Remember: Even paranoids are right sometimes.

Here are a couple other ways to go:

There are data entry, processing and transcription jobs at Freelancer.com. At first glance it looks like they’re all jobs for programmers, but quite a few just need people to enter data. These are not aimed only at retirees; anyone can apply.

YouGov.com awards points to be redeemed for cash and small prizes when you fill out political and consumer product surveys. These things are addicting. But be forewarned: You can easily spend hours to earn $15. Again, these are open to everyone.

Last year, 1.5 million Americans used antennas to get free over-the-air TV programs, according to Nielsen Research. We decided to try it ourselves. We tested a TiVo box for recording shows with an antenna from Antennas Direct. This is like a pumped-up set of rabbit ears.

The picture quality was fine, but we didn’t get the 60 channels touted in their promotion; we got 12. The TiVo also brought in movie and music services such as Hulu Plus, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Pandora and Rhapsody. Bottom line: It was nice, but not enough to get us to drop our cable TV subscription.

But as Netflix adds original shows and TV programs to its lineup, and YouTube videos get better, we can see how some people might easily drop their cable subscription. We loved the original series “Lilyhammer,” about a New York mobster who enters the witness protection program and chooses to live in a small Norwegian city. It’s hilarious.

A new app coming out in October will turn your Android phone into a TomTom GPS device, giving you turn-by-turn directions — and you don’t have to be online.

Pintograph from Alien Skin draws complex line art. If you ever had a Spirograph as a kid, Pintograph is like that but much more sophisticated. It’s free for iPhone and iPad.

Smart Soundtracker fits a soundtrack to your videos and has a button for sharing on Facebook or YouTube. The 99 cent iPhone/iPad app comes with five soundtracks, and you can buy more from within the app.

Tinyurl.com/webneel displays 60 really neat logos. If you need to come up with one for your group or business, these provide great ideas. We liked the one for the programming business Codefish, which showed a fish made of mathematical symbols.

Our youngest relative, age 5, likes to go around the house with arms outstretched, saying “Brains, Brains, they’re coming,” meaning the Zombies. It’s a line from the “Plants vs. Zombies” game he’s been playing since he was 4.

We thought this game was too creepy when it first came out a couple years ago and decided not to write about it. But it’s a megahit for PopCap, which just launched a “Plants vs. Zombies” online store at PvZStore.com. Toys, caps, T-shirts, baby clothes, lunchboxes, mugs, posters, you name it, they’ve got the memorabilia. Creepy apparently is in. A new version of “Plants vs. Zombies” arrives in spring of 2013. We know one little guy who will be very excited about that.

More than 61 percent of the tablet computers sold this year will be iPads, but that’s down from 66 percent last year. In toto, 73 million iPads will be sold this year, estimates Gartner Research, compared to 40 million last year. About 38 million Android tablets will be sold this year, 32 percent of the tablet market.

By 2015, smartphones, tablets, game boxes and other equipment, including wrist watches, will make up 49 percent of all devices that show TV content, up from 18 percent in 2011, according to Screen Digest.

The Spare One is an emergency cellphone that came out in January, but we just recently decided to try one.

The $99 phone has a claimed battery life of 15 years without recharging, if you don’t turn it on, or 10 hours of continuous talk time if you do. It works on a single double-A battery. The point is to keep it in your car’s glove box for emergencies. It has a red button that calls 911, even, they say, if you press it for the first time 15 years later.

If you want to use the Spare One as a regular phone, though, you need to buy a “sim card” from a cellphone service provider. The cost for that will depend on the contract. The lowest we could find was around $35 a month from Virgin Mobile; they let you go month to month.

FundersClub.com is a new crowd-sourcing site, like the better known Kickstarter. It collects investments from individuals who kick in for the manufacture of some product they think should be made or a cause that should be helped. Unlike Kickstarter, however, each investor gets a share in the company or project they invest in.

FundersClub has already closed a couple deals. Members put more than $628,000 in Virool, a new business aimed at connecting video creators with targeted audiences. Members also invested half a million in FundersClub itself. Still open to investments is Sponsorfied, a dreadful made-up word that seems to be aimed at getting product or company sponsorship for sports stadiums and similar visible venues. (Why not have sponsored individual homes? “Hi, we live in the Cheerios house round the corner.”)

Their Coinbase investment startup is like PayPal but uses “bitcoins,” a virtual currency. Hiptype applies Google Analytics to e-books. The minimum investment is $1,000.

FundersClub was created by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and Sean Parker, whom you might remember from the movie portrayal in “The Social Network.” Parker founded Napster and was the first president of FaceBook. Thiel recently cashed out a $500,000 investment in FaceBook for a profit of half a billion. (How come financial advisers never advise their clients to buy into one of those deals?)